It took all night, but early this morning it became clear that Labor had won the Eden-Monaro by-election, when the last of the pre-poll booths reported their results, and a first batch of postal votes were far better for Labor than postal votes usually are.
In this post I’ll show you a map of the results and swings, and break down how each part of Eden-Monaro swung, and how turnout shifted away from election day and towards pre-poll voting.
6:03pm – When I wrote this morning’s post we didn’t know what the final pre-poll count. In the end 6920 people voted on the last day, for a total of 43,684 across the entire voting period. This compares to 44,015 in 2019, so it’s a very slight decline, but will likely be a larger proportion of the total when you factor in a likely decline in turnout.
Polls have just opened in the federal seat of Eden-Monaro in south-eastern New South Wales.
I will be back to cover the results tonight, although coverage will be light until after 8pm.
I wrote about the trends in early voting at the beginning of the week.
Ben is joined by Stewart Jackson from the University of Sydney to preview this weekend’s federal by-election in the seat of Eden-Monaro.
We’ve entered the last week of early voting before this Saturday’s by-election in the south-east NSW seat of Eden-Monaro. We have quite a bit of data about who is casting an early vote, and it tells us that there has been a big increase in postal votes, but it looks like the increase in pre-poll votes will only be slight.
Western Australia is on track to lose the sixteenth seat it gained at the 2016 election. This will trigger a redistribution before the next election, and will have knock-on effects across the state.
Only one of Western Australia’s 16 electorates has enough voters to still be above-quota once the seats are reduced to fifteen, and that one seat sits quite far above the quota.
The latest ABS population figures for December 2019 were released yesterday, and they confirmed what we have suspected for some time. Victoria will gain a 39th seat at the next election, while Western Australia will lose its 16th seat and the Northern Territory (barring any legislative change) will revert to a single electorate.
There was a story in the Sydney Morning Herald last week about how the NSW state government is considering a switch to postal voting for all voters at the 2021 local council elections.
These elections were originally scheduled for September 2020, but were postponed by twelve months in the hope of avoiding the pandemic.
I have been meaning to write a post about the impending determination and possible solutions to the likely merger of the NT’s two federal seats.
